Aesthetic milieus that intensify metabolic processes within the body or in the environment create a context to experience these processes in different ways:
as a physical feeling, a mood, or thought, but also by way of bodily actions that register and mediate processes before we reflect on them consciously.
In the environment, they can register in the form of perceivable patterns;
colors of plants might appear more intense, their growth denser. In this way, the sensibility of nature, which exists in the fact that it changes permanently in response to environmental factors, such as, for example, climate change, can itself be perceived sensuously. The metabolic bonds that embed human organisms in their environment thereby co-create their context of experience.
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In the following, I will briefly describe the different modes and concepts of experience that I will be referring to throughout this thesis in order to articulate an aesthetics of metabolism.
Central to my research have been theories of embodiment in cognitive sciences and phenomenology that focus on the bodily dimensions of experi-ence and how they prime the ways we establish, lose, and re-establish meaningful interactions between ourselves and our environment. Thereby, the qualitative and subjective aspect of phenomenal consciousness is inter-linked: How I experience something, what it is like to experience, and that I am the one experiencing it this way, are not considered separately (Petitmengin 2017, 143). This view was brought forward by biologist, philosopher, and neu-roscientist Francisco Varela, who coined the term enactivism. He attempted a new understanding of subjectivity as a mutual conditioning of body and mind, thereby responding to a concept of subjectivity that would put a large emphasis on cognition and understanding the body as being governed by the brain. To explain this mutual conditioning of body and mind, Varela wanted to find a way to describe how perception and action emerge at the same time, or are otherwise intrinsically linked. That way, it would not be a brain directing bodily movements after the visual sense transmits data from the environment, but instead, the way we perceive and act could be understood as emerging together (Varela [1929] 1999). He proposed viewing the relation between the organism and the world as being coupled and not as opposites.
In this way, the organism cannot do anything other than continuously engage with its surroundings, in manifold ways: “[The] world is not something given to us but something we engage in by moving, touching, breathing, and eating.
This is what I call cognition as enaction since enaction connotes this bringing forth by concrete handling” ([1929] 1999, 95). Engagement with the world as understood in this field of cognitive science thus contains different bodily processes, through which the body is interrelated with the environment.
Cognition—as mental actions—cannot be regarded as separate from the body. Even though bodily processes do not necessarily come to our conscious awareness, they impact us in a pre-reflective manner.
Understanding pre-reflective experiences as preceding our conscious reference to the world, while, at the same time, creating something like a meaningful relation to the world and priming conscious reference that follows from there, can be further explored with Whitehead’s process philosophy.
Whitehead differentiated between perception in the mode of presentational immediacy and perception in the mode of causal efficacy in order to clarify the inaccuracy of mistaking an abstraction, a belief, or a representation with the concrete real event or physical entity, which, at the time, he diagnosed for philosophy as well as the natural sciences. In his treatise, Process and Reality, from 1929, he aimed at challenging our representations and abstractions of
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nature and perception—not to question abstractions and their usage as such, but rather the process through which we get to them.
Presentational immediacy is connected to pure sense perception, and causal efficacy allows for the basic perception of causal relatedness. In human experience, symbolic reference functions as an intermediary element between the two modes. Symbolic reference brings that which is gathered in pure sense perception and in interpretive causal efficacy, into a “unity of feeling”
(Whitehead [1929] 1985, 168)—which can be identified with what we call
“higher cognitive functions,” including representing, planning, and monitoring.
Perception in the mode of causal efficacy and in the mode of presentational immediacy is not preserved for higher-order organisms alone, and it is in the phase of symbolic reference that errors can occur—that we, for example, mis-take a reflection in a mirror for something real.
With his emphasis on perception as encompassing different modes, White-head stepped away from strong notions of subject and object, which he replaced with the term “occasions of experience.” Occasions of experience always encompass both subject and object, as they emerge from experience.
In process-thought, conscious experience, thereby, is dismantled as just one part of experience, a rare modification, as philosopher Paul Stenner sums up this point in Whitehead:
First, conscious experience is not essential to experience but a high-grade and rare modification of more fundamental experience: it is the crown and not the base of experience. Second, experience is more like a going through which patterns the world. For both James and Whitehead, the universe is no longer conceived in terms of basic building blocks of enduring matter (pure physical atoms), but as being composed out of activity that is ultimately analyzable only into interconnected and con-catenated streams of events (occurrences, happenings, occasions during which something is ‘gone through.’ (2018, 122)
The mode of perception that concerns these experiences is one that tackles a different understanding of subjectivity, as processual itself. But process thought does not follow the statement that everything flows; rather, those events we experience are made of a series of smaller events, of phases, which might or might not lead to an event that we can consciously experience. To exemplify this, we could look at the micro-scale of our body, how the cells form body tissue, organs, bones, limbs, and, finally, the shape of our body we refer to as my body. In the artworks I analyze, such as Rahm’s installations, these bodily processes are intensified in such a way that we can experience their effects on how we feel, perceive, and act.
The philosophical question I want to address in this study is non-trivial: How can we harmonize a framework of process thought with subjective experience
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and an aesthetic theory that is able to account for those shifts in perception that lead to new meaningful experiences? Meaningful experiences are, for Dewey, cumulative experiences that form a context for a series of different experiences—that make them stand out as meaningful to a subject. The sum of the different experiences during my hike, for example, become meaningful to me if I regard them from a metabolic perspective. How I perceived my environment and my own body, how attentive or inattentive I was, makes sense considering the difference in atmospheric composition I encountered throughout the hike. I will briefly review Dewey’s concept of aesthetic experi-ence to explain how this relates to my study.
According to Dewey, experience itself appears as a continuous flow. Yet, this flow encompasses phases within which experience can become meaningful to the subject, can be reflected upon and lead to “new beginnings of experience”
(Dewey [1934] 1980, 17). This is in part because, in Dewey’s understanding, the experiencing subject encounters constant conflict in the world. The subject is in permanent struggle with reality:
In the process of living, attainment of a period of equilibrium is at the same time the initiation of a new relation to the environment, one that brings with it potency of new adjustments to be made through struggle.
The time of consummation is also one of beginning anew. Any attempt to perpetuate beyond its term the enjoyment attending the time of fulfill-ment and harmony constitutes withdrawal from the world. Hence it marks the lowering and loss of vitality. But, through the phases of perturbation and conflict, there abides the deep-seated memory of an underlying harmony, the sense of which haunts life like the sense of being founded on a rock. (Dewey [1934] 1980, 17)
Terms like equilibrium and harmony, which Dewey applies here, must be seen as pragmatic choices to describe the relation between the living organism and its environment in a particular situation and not as the expression of an ide-alistic system of thought. Instead, for Dewey, thinking about the living being as constantly struggling with the gap between expectations and reality allows him to think of life as being inherently creative. An aesthetic experience then allows us to structure experiences regarding this conflicting engagement with the world and is therefore not only experience in the sense of a state or mode of a sensitive entity, but operational. Aesthetic experience is a sense-making process; it enables us to have new experiences outside of the anticipation of a future or attachments to a past. An aesthetic experience is the feeling of a momentary “unity” with the world:
Only when the past ceases to trouble and anticipations of the future are not perturbing is a being wholly united with his environment and therefore fully alive ... To grasp the sources of esthetic experience it is,
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therefore, necessary to have recourse to animal life below the human scale.” (Dewey [1934] 1980, 18)
In my understanding, aesthetic experience is not a matter of higher-order cognition, of representation and reflection, but instead of an attunement to a world that cannot be completely consciously grasped. In this way, my personal experience of the air pocket in Thailand has stood out for me thus far as an aesthetic experience, a moment of felt presence that charged my experience with meaning. Talking about the embodied relations between an organism and its environment and how they prime subjective experi-ence brings into view the rich findings of affect theories. Affect studies have a cross-disciplinary approach whose beginnings are often referred back to Spinoza, with his special attention to a body’s affects (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, 10). Affect seems further to be located in or mediating the pre-linguistic or pre-representational:
Affect is an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more sustained state of relation as well as the passage (and the duration of passage) of forces or intensities. That is, affect is found in those inten-sities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body, and other-wise), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and resonances themselves. (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, 1)
As an in-between, as forces or intensity, affect has an operational character in the composition of the relation between organisms and their environ-ment. The body in affect studies can be seen as a “nexus of finely interlaced force fields,” (Highmore 2010, 119) rather than a closed system. As such, affect enables us to engage with the world in ever new ways (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, 2).
Ultimately, this emphasis on affective relations with the environment comes with a challenge for our understanding of subjectivity. If we engage with the world because of the capacity to be affected by it, and to affect it reciprocally, how do we move from the basic affect to the assessment of meaning of that affect? How can we understand if a sensorial experience or feeling caused by an affective relation with the world is signaling, for example, threat or promise (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, 10)? How can we develop a form of critique of affects, and address the necessary concerns related to them? My exploration of metabolic processes, and how we can come to have an aesthetic experi-ence of them, can contribute to these questions. Insofar as the aesthetic perspective that I propose here understands phases of pre-reflective experi-ence as inherently meaningful and meaning-producing, we come to see that, even though the periphery of our conscious awareness is not penetrated by
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reason, it is not without rationality either. As philosopher Susanne Langer puts it in her description of what she called non-discursive symbolism: Such a symbolism of light and color, or of tone, is in itself perfectly rational, but not to be conceived through language. This symbolism is found in a dimension of rationality that forgoes language. It can be read by the mind “in a flash”; it
“preserves in a disposition or an attitude” (Langer 1951, 79). Rationality, and ultimately meaning, as Langer continues, have to be redefined1 in order to understand that “[r]ationality ... is embodied in every mental act” (1951, 80).
The subject that emerges from the pre-reflective relation with the world, from the attunement to metabolic processes, will be described briefly in the next section. A detailed account will then be given in the following chapters.